Ryan DionneSHARE
There’s often an “us versus them” mentality among brick-and-mortar retailers and online retailers. The brick-and-mortar shops hang their hats on exceptional, face-to-face customer service while e-tailers tout large product selections.
Regardless which experience shoppers prefer, few question that the Internet will continue to affect consumer behavior to some degree.
Skiing Business caught up with a couple successful e-tailers who shared their insights on what businesses should do to start or bolster e-commerce sales. The bottom line: Don’t rush into an e-commerce site. It takes time and commitment to realize a significant return.
SEO
Amy Dannwolf, vice president of Powder7, an online ski retailer based in Golden, Colo., helped develop the Powder7 website from the ground up. She says effective search engine optimization, or SEO, should be an e-tailer’s first priority when building a website. Good SEO practices are what propel a website to the top of a results page when an online shopper enters a query in a search engine such as Google or Yahoo. But achieving optimal SEO takes time.
“It requires real know-how,” Dannwolf says. “There are a lot of key components.”
Those components include everything from writing clean, efficient code when building a site to using relevant keywords in the page headers.
There’s even a fine line between having too much content on an e-commerce site and not having enough, says Steve Kopitz, owner of Michigan-based Summit Sports Inc., which owns 16 e-commerce sites, including Skis.com, and five brick-and-mortar stores. Skis.com, for instance, appeared closer to the top of certain ski-specific searches once Kopitz’s team removed the inline skate products from the site in order to make it less cluttered.
While many retailers won’t venture into writing their own code-and they shouldn’t unless they truly know how-most legit developers will be able to walk a business through the optimization steps. If a developer claims he can get a business ranked near the top of a search in just a few days or months, he’s probably lying, Dannwolf says.
Using a Merchant Platform
Short of developing an e-commerce platform internally, retailers have a variety of platform development options at a variety of prices-including free.
Kopitz says his company used Yahoo Merchant Solutions to develop and manage its e-commerce sites for the first five years they operated, and he highly recommends it to other retailers.
Easy to setup and maintain, the Yahoo program offers a few development templates, ranging from $40 per month to $300 per month. With each program, the retailer has access to technical support, set-up assistance and various other tools. In return, Yahoo receives a transaction fee ranging from .75 percent to 1.5 percent of sales.
Yahoo’s or any other company’s platform will dictate the e-commerce experience for the buyer and the seller. The platform determines how products are sorted and displayed, how the buyer’s shopping cart appears, and how orders are processed.
Even with a platform template, retailers may need to tweak their sites so they display products how they want, Dannwolf says. Powder7 and Kopitz’s team now use and maintain custom platforms to give them more control.
Pay-Per-Click Campaigns
Another key to bolstering e-sales is establishing a pay-per-click campaign. E-commerce companies determine keywords-such as “kids skis” or “Nordica boots”-that online shoppers are likely to use when searching for their products.
When a user searches using those designated terms, the retailer’s website has a better chance of appearing in a “sponsored links” area on the search page. Each time the user clicks the sponsored link, the company pays the search engine a predetermined amount.
Kopitz suggests retailers develop a pay-per-click campaign as soon as they launch their e-commerce websites.
“Most companies spend more than half of their (web-related) budget on this,” Kopitz says. That may be unrealistic for many businesses, but his comment exemplifies pay-per-click’s importance.
Kopitz says it pays off for some keywords but not for others. Determining which keywords work well varies by retailer, but Google’s AdWords program, and others like it, is a good starting point.
“What works for someone else may not work for you,” Kopitz says.
Be Better Than the Rest
In an industry where the manufacturer dictates most current-year product prices, e-tailers need to set themselves apart from their competitors.
Perhaps that means incorporating product reviews into their websites, offering free shipping, having live chat or simply building the most user-friendly site.
“It’s easy to put stuff online and think it’s just going to handle itself,” Dannwolf says. “But there has to be a person behind it.”
One way to ensure better business is consistently fast shipping.
Kopitz says customers expect to wait between two and five days for their product to arrive if they pay for shipping-slightly more if shipping is free. Anything more than that will prevent customers from returning-especially when another e-tailer is just a click away.
As online retailers know, e-commerce isn’t easy. If it sounds too daunting, it’s time to reevaluate priorities.
According to John Breese, Backcountry.com’s president and co-founder, diversifying away from core strengths isn’t a smart business move.
Have a comment? E-mail us at editor@skiingbusiness.com.
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